Jenna Ortega paints grueling portrait of her Wednesday schedule
Jenna Ortega says she didn't sleep and was pulling her hair out during the eight-month Wednesday shoot
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It ain’t easy being Wednesday, apparently. Jenna Ortega’s star is steadily on the rise, but she’s certainly put in the work for it. Maybe a bit more work than one would reasonably expect for a fun young adult Netflix series (even if it is helmed by Tim Burton), but hard work nonetheless, as she explained at a recent Q&A (per Variety).
“It was: show up to set two hours early, do that 12-14 hour day, then go home and then get on a Zoom and have whatever lesson that I had. Or show up to my apartment, my cello teacher was already waiting for me,” the actor shared. “It was just constantly going, and if you could on a weekend, if we weren’t shooting the sixth day that week, it was ‘All right, well then, we’ll get your lessons in on that day.’”
The eight-episode series reportedly took eight months to shoot, and Ortega was in basically every scene. She described herself as “adamant about being as well prepared as possible,” leading her to learn the cello in addition to taking fencing lessons—all this despite the fact that doubles were available to film some of the more technically difficult bits. “I did not get any sleep. I pulled my hair out,” she recalled. “There’s so many FaceTime calls that my dad answered of me hysterically crying.”
Is there such a thing as working too hard? All of this is on top of the fact that she filmed the series’ iconic dance number while sick with COVID-19. (A dance number she choreographed herself, by the way, though she had no prior experience doing so.) The pressure the teen star put on herself to perform probably explains why she still showed up to set despite feeling like she’d “been hit by a car.” (Ortega didn’t test positive until after filming began.)
The blood, sweat, and tears did pay off. Or if not precisely paid off (because what does that even mean in the streaming economy?), those efforts were rewarded with multiple acting nominations and big viewership numbers. According to a new report, Wednesday had “the most-watched premiere of 2022 in the 40-day viewership window,” beating out House Of The Dragon (per Deadline). The series’ success paved the way for an easy second-season renewal, but hopefully, Ortega gets to take it a little easier this time around.
35 Comments
I don’t see how it is even legal to let the actors & crews work that many hours her day and week Maybe when are you 19 you can make it work but the crew probably don’t have her energy & resilience
Buncha pussies. I bet the extras want to piss every couple hours too.
Extras are a lower form of human. They don’t have to piss.
When they’re dressed in black, they can just piss themselves on set and no one will notice.
Union contracts specify exactly how much they can work, when they need breaks, etc.
No union contracts don’t specify how much people CAN work (at least not the crew contracts). There are no limits.
They specify when breaks SHOULD happen, and what the penalties will be if those breaks don’t come. Basically, it all comes down to paying people more.
You can one hundred percent work people a 19-hour day with no meal breaks, and then bring them back in five hours later to do it again, as long as you’re willing to pay the meal penalties, forced calls, etc.
There’s a lot of standing around and waiting on sets. So you’re there for 12 – 14 hours, but you’re not usually continuously doing something that whole time.
She described herself as “adamant about being as well prepared as possible,” leading her to learn the cello in addition to taking fencing lessons—all this despite the fact that doubles were available to film some of the more technically difficult bits.This was her own method acting type personal commitment to the role. It was not required.
Ok, but don’t you think it’s a little over the top that she insists that in between takes, everyone refer to her as “President Lincoln”?
“Ok, CUT! And bring in the cello double! C’MON people! We only have this afternoon to shoot the dueling cello battle between Wednesday and The Devil!”
It suddenly makes a lot more sense why they decided to edit in shots of Christina Ricci during scenes Thora Birch had already filmed, rather than redo the whole thing.
And I’m sure the crew is working as hard if not harder, and making a fraction of what she’s making.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I only watch these things if there’s a boom operator I like.
Hardcore, bro!
and? there are people who work harder than you too but youre still allowed to complain about your job
Eight months? Surely that’s not all continuous. Eight weeks might seem a little short, but it would be easier to believe than eight months. That’s a month of shooting for each episode, and they’re not even an hour long.
Yeah, based on her account, they would have worked 190+ days and came out with around 415 minutes of runtime. I can’t imagine they only averaged just over two minutes of usable footage per day.
2 is a little short, but 5 minutes of runtime per day is about right.
Rehearsing, re-takes, fucking with the lighting, resetting between takes, pee breaks…Things take time. Even when you don’t need to switch film canisters on the cameras anymore. 😛
It’s not continuous. You typically get weekends off and on a shoot with that much complicated stunt work, practical effects and VFX, it takes more time than normal. They also likely had a few scheduled days off here and there.
Two weeks (10 days) is standard for hour-longs. I’m guessing they had a lot more stuff to do (tricky technical stuff, crowd scenes, etc.)
It is pretty long for a TV show (usually 4-6 months of shooting) but not unheard of. I haven’t seen the show, but it’s all dependent on the content. I know the show has a big dance number and those alone can take weeks to shoot depending on the complexity. Fight scenes, visual effects, stunts, etc are all things that can take a long time to shoot.That all being said, most likely not continuous. They most likely had a week hiatus somewhere during shooting (generally around a holiday).
Eight hour-long episodes is four feature movies’ worth. How would you shoot that much in just eight weeks when it took about two weeks to shoot a regular 42min TV show episode back in the bad old days of syndicated television – and that was typically with gruellingly long workdays also.
Eight regular 42 minute TV episodes is also four feature movies’ worth. And it still takes about two weeks to shoot a regular hour long TV show today. That’s why eight weeks seems short, but four times as long as that seems considerably stranger to me. It took about ten months to film season 8 of Game of Thrones, which ran for a little bit longer than Wednesday, but was many times more complex. I watched Wednesday, and liked it (More than GoT Season 8, for sure), but aside from a few scenes it didn’t seem particularly more overwrought than Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which filmed its first twenty episodes in about nine months.I mean, I can believe that it took eight months, it just seems quite long unless there were several weeks worth of breaks from filming at some intervals. Any maybe there was, but Ortega was still putting in many hours studying, training, and practicing every day so it didn’t feel like time off. But it struck me as longer than I would have expected.
Looking at Wiki, it looks like filming happened from September 2021 to March 2022. Would guess they probably had a holiday break baked in there. And we know Jenna got COVID at some point as there was that story about how she did the dance scene with COVID, guessing they had to stop production for a few weeks after that too.The timeframe seems reasonable if they had those couple of breaks and it was more like 7 months of actual filming to begin with. Jenna may have had an earlier start to working on the show just because she had to learn all sorts of things for the role too.
Unlike a feature, she is also in virtually every scene of the show.I have no doubt she worked every day for every bit of eight months.
It still takes two weeks (ok, technically 8-9 days) to shoot a network TV show.
Signed, a crew member on a network TV show.
Good to know! I wasn’t sure, didn’t want to make any (potentially bad) hot take assumptions… 😀
Eight weeks would be five days of shooting per episode. That’s insane, especially for a show like Wednesday. Eight months sounds like a lot but is definitely way more believable.
If I understand this right, Ortega was forced to work herself to the bone by the cruel and relentless.. Ortega?
Is there such a thing as working too hard?
Yes. The answer is yes.
candy ass
But those poor editors making that STUPID dance look good… probably took another eight months. Christ what a turd.
So they never had a Wednesday off?